Heidegger after Brennan

There are many ways in which Teresa Brennan deliberately and explicitly set her work in relation to Heidegger's. In Exhausting Modernity (2000), her point of departure is "at least informed by . . . the critique of foundationalism begun by Heidegger" (Brennan 2000, 14). Throughout that work, as she builds her argument in readings of Marx, Freud and Lacan, Heidegger's name surfaces again and again showing his work to be a point of departure from which she does not quite depart, but which, rather continues to inform her readings of these others. For instance, she links his concern with the objectifi cation of knowledge toLacan's theory of the objectifi cation of knowledge, his thought of the "standing reserve" to Marx's "standing army" and his critique of technology, more broadly speaking, to Benjamin's thinking of physics and metaphysics. Indeed, in History after Lacan (1993), she puts it like this: "Heidegger, in this book, is a little like the butler. He comes on and off at the beginning and end of every chapter, he is obviously crucial although he does not star, and he probably did it" (Brennan 1993, 17). There are many who would be happy to agree that Heidegger did it; the problem is in fi guring out just what it is. For Teresa Brennan, it involved undermining all assumptions that the subject is the starting point of ontology, which is also the assumption that the place occupied by the subject in the space of the world is what gives it this privileged position. This is the metaphysical thinking that Heidegger sought to overturn. But Brennan will insist it also involved far too much in the way of ontology, meaning that it happened on a level of abstraction that was not good. This is not to say that it is bad, but rather that Heidegger's investigation of the question of the meaning of Being is so abstract that the conclusions which follow from it "might lead anywhere." When Brennan makes this particular claim she does so in a vaguely threatening way which, along with a footnote citing Lacoue-Labarthe, suggests that that anywhere might very well be a distinctly bad somewhere.